Tibetan to Yoruba: respect, emphasis and ownership are different reasons to change a pronoun
A respectful reference can remain singular in meaning
Tibetan distinguishes respectful third-person ཁོང་ from familiar reference, while permitting that honorific to mean he or she. The Yoruba Yé Mi course also describes respectful use of a normally plural third-person pronoun for one parent. A target plural-looking form can therefore retain a single respected referent; it does not necessarily mean that the Tibetan source described several people.
The distinction becomes important when the passage moves from one parent to siblings. The Yoruba lesson contrasts those conversational contexts even though the same respectful or plural response can occur. Keep the Tibetan referent’s identity and actual number explicit in the larger exchange rather than deriving the headcount from the target pronoun alone.
Direct address is another role. Tibetan respectful you speaks to the listener, while honorific he or she speaks about someone. Yoruba has respect resources for both environments, but they must not be swapped. A Tibetan question addressed to an elder should not turn into a third-person report merely because both versions sound deferential.
Emphatic first person is not a replacement for Tibetan egophoric marking
The Yoruba course distinguishes regular subject pronouns from emphatic pronouns, including mo and èmi for first-person reference. The difference provides a target choice about how the participant is expressed. Tibetan egophoric auxiliaries instead concern personal knowledge or involvement, which can arise through being a recipient rather than an actor.
A Tibetan writer who personally received a letter need not become an emphatically foregrounded Yoruba sender. Recover the event first: someone else sent it and the writer received it. Selecting èmi solely because the Tibetan auxiliary feels personal would introduce an emphasis decision before the target subject has even been identified correctly.
The Yoruba lesson also shows that the emphatic and regular forms cannot be interchanged in every environment. In a Tibetan exchange asking what about me, the target needs the form suited to that independent conversational role. A pronoun that works as a short subject before a verb is not automatically appropriate when it stands apart as a contrasted participant.
Mine and ours should preserve the Tibetan owner, not the observer
Yoruba Yé Mi derives independent possessive forms through ti plus an emphatic pronoun, giving tèmi for mine and tàwa for ours. Tibetan can express ownership through an egophoric copula, but that does not mean every egophoric event is possessive. First determine whether the source really establishes ownership or merely a personally experienced event.
For the Tibetan example this key is mine, an ownership expression is relevant. For another person sending the speaker a letter, the essential point is receipt. Replacing the second event with a Yoruba mine expression could lose what happened, even if the delivered object subsequently belongs to the writer.
Tibetan ང་གཉིས་ also specifies we two. Yoruba tàwa identifies shared first-person ownership without itself restricting the owners to a pair. When two people jointly own an object, preserve that exact source group rather than enlarging it into an unspecified household or community. The ownership relation and the owners’ number must both survive the translation.
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